Panch Mahavrat or The Perennial Path The Art of Living

Author(s): Osho Rajnish
Publisher: Osho Rajnish

Page 24

CHAPTER 3. MATERIAL PROSPERITY AND NONPOSSESSIVENESS
Just as darkness increases before early morning, slavery increases before the coming possibility of freedom. An affluent person is in deep bondage, so he realises - becomes conscious of what bondage is. We adjust ourselves to smaller kinds of bondage, we swallow them, we endure them. The greater the bondage, the harder it is to endure them. We endure small chains in the hope that they will be reduced in course of time - in the near future. So the idea of renouncing whatever one has got does not occur to a poor person, because his efforts to obtain what he has not got continue. Now a rich person who has got all those things for which he was labouring all the time, realizes that he has really achieved nothing. On one side there is nothing left for him to obtain and looking from the other side, what he has achieved is nothing at all. Everything is collected in the world outside, but there is a total void within. These are moments which begin the spiritual life in an affluent person. This is his first ray. But I do not say that all affluent persons achieve this transformation - revolutionary change. The majority of such affluent persons stop at the foundation, and they are not able to construct a building of revolution in their lives. But there are reasons for that also. Along with this, please understand that it is not that a poor person can never be a spiritual person. A poor person also is transformed into a spiritual individual, and there are reasons for it.
The first thing to be remembered is this; that there is no knowledge without experience. Experience alone is knowledge. The experience of wealth alone leads to liberation. Suppose a person, even in his poverty, has become spiritual in this life, then he must have got the experience of wealth during one of his many previous births. Otherwise, it is not possible to have knowledge without experience. Nobody can be free from the desire of wealth, the experience of wealth. How can we realise that a particular thing is worthless without knowing it first'? How can we come to a decision that a particular unhappiness is worth giving up without having first experiencing it? Whatever is unknown is to be feared; there is no scope for getting acquainted with it. If we wish to know our enemy it is necessary to be acquainted with him first. To know the wrong, one has to pass through it. Those who fall into pits on the roads and miss their way know the pits very well. There is an other way in our life to get knowledge. It is possible that what we call life is very short but the journey of life is very long.
Understand this happening thus: a person has undergone the experience of wealth in his previous births so thoroughly that even in poverty in this life, it is possible for him to jump into the spiritual world; otherwise there cannot be any other reason. On the contrary it is also possible that a man may get all the wealth he can in this life and yet be pitiable and poor. If a person, after having obtained enough of wealth, cannot free himself from it, then I would like to say that he who has obtained wealth in the true sense of the term is one who is able to be free from the desire for wealth. This is his testimony. He is wealthy who can renounce his wealth. And if he is able to do so, there is somewhere within him a poor pitiable man. If a person after having got plenty of wealth in this life, is not able to rouse thirst for religion, it only means that he has lived in such abject poverty and wretchedness in his past births that even with so much wealth in this life he is not able to remove that impression of wretchedness and poor condition. Poverty is still there within him. His experience of wealth is new for him. That experience is not transformed into knowledge. Knowledge takes place after passing through many experiences. Knowledge is the substance of experiences. Knowledge is the scent of many flowers of experiences. To such a person, this is his first experience of wealth. No sooner does the experience of wealth become knowledge than an individual begins to be free from the greed for wealth.
NONPOSSESSIVENESS THROUGH YOGA
An individual becomes free from longing only after experiencing them, because there is no other
The Perennial Path: The Art of Living
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Osho